Document collaboration is generally used to describe a process of and/or system for sharing a document with a plurality of entities and/or constructing a document via a plurality of entities. For example, a first entity may create an initial draft of a document and make the document accessible to one or more other entities. The other entities may then review the document and/or make changes to the document.
Some of the more common applications for document collaboration involve business settings. Traditionally, one or more in-house servers have been utilized to store a document, and entities with permissions to access the document were able to navigate to a specified location in a file directory of the one or more servers to view and/or modify the document. For example, a first entity may author the document and store it in a particular file location on the server. The entity may then notify the other entities to provide them with information on where the document is located and the other entities may read and/or review the document.
Today, cloud storage is growing in popularity for both business applications and personal applications. While the underlying concepts are similar to those of traditional, in-house servers, there are some differences. For example, cloud storage is generally an online storage database (e.g., typically accessible via a public web address, although it may be merely accessible via a private web address that is internal to a particular network(s)) hosted by a third party (e.g., although it may be hosted by the business and/or user). Moreover, the data is typically stored on virtualized pools of storage, as opposed to a fixed, physical storage device (e.g., the files that appear to be located on a particular drive may in fact be located on a plurality of different storage units and/or servers).
It will be appreciated that regardless of how and/or where data is stored (e.g., whether it be on an in-house server and/or in cloud storage), when a document is accessible by a plurality of entities it may be useful for respective entities to be aware of what other entities with access to that document are doing to the document (e.g., what changes others are making). Today there are several approaches for providing such information. For example, some programs, such as some word processing programs, allow an entity to track changes in a document. These changes may be displayed in a different font color and/or may be otherwise distinguished from the rest of the document when subsequent entities review the document. However, this approach generally requires an entity to open the document to determine whether changes have been made by another entity. Another approach is for the entity making the change to email the document to other entities with access to the document whenever edits are made. However, this approach may be undesirable because multiple copies of the same document may be distributed (e.g., making it difficult for an entity to know whether s/he is working on the most recent version) and/or because document attachments may increase a size of a mailbox of an entity.